For their first time out, Israeli’s Ethiopian community has produced a film that enters their adopted country’s pantheon of moviemaking. That said, Zruvabel is not without its flaws. At 72 minutes, this short (by today’s standards, anyway) feature film is the first time we can see a snapshot of a population, now in its second and third generations in Israel, through the eyes of one family, for whom the film is titled.
Zruvabel screens as a part of the Seattle Jewish Film Festival on Tues., March 16.
To call this film a modern Fiddler on the Roof wouldn’t be much of a stretch, with the family patriarch, Gite (Meir Desai), as the much more austere Tevye. Gite has three children — a fourth died during his army service — who emigrated from Ethiopia with him and his wife, Molo. Gite’s children cause him tsuris while he, once an important man in his homeland but now working as a street sweeper, struggles to come to terms with the hand modern society has dealt him.
The eldest, Hana, has left her husband because his fervent embrace of Judaism has alienated his family and led him to violence. The middle child, the beautiful Almaz, has been promised to a man twice her age, but she rebels against her father’s traditional ways and falls in love with a distant cousin she meets while tending bar at a nightclub. The youngest, Gili, is smart but mixed up in the wrong crowd, despite his father’s attempts to extract him from his dangerous lifestyle.
Hana’s son, video-camera-wielding, 12-year-old Itzhak, is the only native Israeli in the family, yet he’s only too eager to leave his country — he’s known to everyone as Spike Lee because of his fascination with the American filmmaker, and expresses his desire to move to Hollywood at his first opportunity.
The metaphorical Russian soldiers come in the form of two police officers who harass and mock the Ethiopian immigrants, eventually leading to the film’s tragic but not unexpected climax.
Director Shmuel Beru has created an unflinching look into a population that’s largely ignored by his country’s citizens and pretty much unknown outside of Israel. Beru himself is an Ethiopian émigré who walked the Sudanese desert during the Operation Moses rescue mission, and his life in the ancient city of Tzfat is reflected in Zruvabel’s city streets and urban underground.
My biggest complaint about Zruvabel is the muddy plot and the lack of character development among some of the players. The young Spike Lee’s use of his video camera, for example, to introduce us to his family is a strong opening, but he’s hardly integral to the story beyond that. Gite pushes Hana and her husband to reconcile, but after that final view into their loveless marriage, hardly mid-way through the film, we never see the husband again. Many of the arcs that should have been brought to conclusion sadly were not.
Thankfully, the long walk by the townspeople, accompanied by the mournful dirge “Anatevka,” happened before the film’s timeline instead of during, sparing us an extra 20 minutes at the end.
That an Ethiopian cast and crew has debuted with such a strong film may be more notable than the film itself, but it’s a notable feat nonetheless.
SJFF Preview: Ethiopia in Israel
